No. BT is concerned that invading their customers privacy with no potential profit from doing so is likely to be expensive. They're also concerned that limiting their customers' access to the service they've paid for will cause their customers to move to other ISPs, thus costing them still more money.
But who cares what's motivating them to do this? They're on our side, for once.
This is just code to have the Act applied to small ISP's as well as large, and nothing to do with repealing the act altogether like it sounds.
Not really, no. At least one of the grounds for the complaint, that the law is incompatible with the EU's regulations that require ISPs to be considered as mere carriers of data and not responsible for their users' actions, would result in at least parts of the law being struck off the books entirely if the courts held in their favour.
Heaven forbid a government finding new and innovative ways to deliver services to its people. Maybe the iPhone is not the best platform, but at least they are trying.
They're failing. Over three times as many people in the UK have smartphones that run Symbian than iPhones. Probably somewhere in the region of 50% more have Blackberries. Yet neither of these platforms were targetted, despite the obvious fact that an application for either of these would be much more useful. Why? I'd guess it's because it's not as headline catching. We don't want our government to be catching headlines, we want them to do things that are actually useful.
waste our money on tailored apps for one specific proprietary (and expensive) platform
Proprietary, expensive, and not even with the (poor) justification of it being the most common. iPhone's market penetration in the UK is very low compared to other phone OSs. Both Symbian and Blackberry have much higher sales, and as both of those have been around for longer they probably have an even larger user base. (How long do you use a phone for? 2 years ago, iPhone's sales in the UK were less than 1% of all smartphones.)
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but there are PLENTY of other devices that have buttons that do different things in different situations.
Yes. It's very common. And I regularly see people getting pissed off by it because they wanted to do one thing but ended up with the other (e.g. my DVD player has a button that pressed once pauses, but pressed again stops playback... my housemate regularly presses it twice by mistake and then has to seek back to where he was). It's almost always a mistake, unless there's a good reason you can't have any more buttons (e.g. the device would then need to be too large for some external constraint).
MiTM attack. e.g. using an internet cafe, which installs a transparent SSL proxy and can monitor all your transactions. Its OK if you have your own browser device, and previously installed your SSL certificate over a secure channel. But if you get the 'stop sign' over an insecure channel, take it seriously. They don't need to clone your server to compromise you, just a man-in-the-middle.
All you need to do to make this reasonably safe is memorize a few hex digit pairs of your signature fingerprint to check against it when you authorize the exception.
I wonder... did the discussed tests perform a reverse-DNS lookup on the web site's IP address before trying to connect to the https port? Was the result of that reverse DNS lookup used to compare against the SSL cert's CN, or did the test blindly assume that the CN must match the original site's FQDN?
Even if it did, the result may not be valid. Let's pick on the domains on my hosted virtual server, for example. I have one IP address to myself, and host about 20 domains on it. Let's say the domain they choose to examine is dsf.org.uk; they resolve dsf.org.uk to an IP address, which happens to be 80.68.89.98. Connect to that via HTTPS and you'll be given a certificate that's only valid for meridiandigital.net. But do a reverse DNS lookup on it, and you'll get an entirely different address back (meridian.meridiandigital.co.uk).
The only check they could be performing that would make sense would be to test whether the domain in the certificate resolves to the correct IP, but even that's not going to get them very far: my certificate is valid for any subdomain of meridiandigital.net, but I could easily have given different subdomains different IP addresses...
Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels.
Square or not, what's interesting is that it appears to be using a vertical rather than horizontal orientation for the subpixel units... that's going to really screw up anyone doing subpixel rendering...
Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn't print halftoned images, and that's what GP was talking about.
It's a very long time since I saw a 300dpi colour inkjet marketed. My current one is 5760x1440, and was a cheapish almost-entry-level model. It also is capable of producing variable sized droplets, and has two different intensities of each coloured ink, so is definitely not an "on or off CMYK pixel" printer. I don't think anybody sells those any more.
While I don't think Apple products are magical, people who don't understand why they sell (or why Nintendo products sell) are fixated by feature lists but kinda miss out on the whole dimension of actual usability of those features.
Bizarrely, I've often found Apple products to be less usable than competitors. The last one I bought was an iPod Shuffle, which suffered from a number of catastrophic usability failures (e.g. buttons that can do multiple different things in different situations, which I often find confusing despite my degree in computer science and specialisation in UI design, so I imagine it must be really tricky for some people; lack of integration with Windows drag and drop so I can't just drop music files on its icon in My Computer as I can with my current device; bizarre behaviour that involves deleting the device's current contents if I plug it in to somebody else's machine to transfer files from there) not to mention other design flaws (IIRC the device could not be used and charged at the same time, which I am perfectly able to do with my current (much cheaper) MP3 player; it also needed a nonstandard and rather flimsy adaptor to connect it to a PC whereas my current device connects via a standard USB cable; I won't even mention the battery issues as this has been done to death).
What Apple *actually* makes are products that *look nice*, usually by looking simple. Looking simple is not the same thing as being usable.
Another question: have they closed the obvious loophole?
(Create two companies, A LLC and B LLC. A LLC performs any random trade you want, and hires B LLC to design an IT system for it. Arrange the accounts such that B's fees are at least as high as A's profit. Extract profit as dividend from B, tax free.)
This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level...
Interesting. I've not read any other books by the author, but I've just finished Schild's Ladder, which is about life in an area of the universe with alternative physical laws, which are described as very similar to rules for cellular automata. The life forms are basically patterns in a network of connected nodes which cause a similar pattern to arise nearby when the rules for iterating the network are followed. Couldn't help thinking about Game of Life while reading it...
This was back when you could use a catchall address for a domain without being overwhelmed by spam
You still can. I have several catchall domains. I have a bayesian filter which at last check was dumping about 2,000 spams per day with only around 1 false positive per month. I use sender whitelisting to allow messages from addresses I've sent to in the past. I blacklist specific recipients when the volume of junk getting through the bayesian filter becomes too high (I drop any message addressed to any blacklisted recipient, even if it's also addressed to non-blacklisted ones). I use SPF on any domain it's set up for. I block messages claiming to be from my domains but entering remotely. This brings the volume down to around 15 per day that I have to deal with manually.
Um, I dunno, maybe because they were still investigating and didn't want to jump to any conclusions?
Dunno. If I were investigating it and saw a picture of a kid waving a loaded revolver (a weapon illegal to possess in this country under almost any circumstances) and holding a sign saying he was going to "fuck up the bullies and leave this world", I'd probably jump to conclusions.
A foreign law enforcement agency is scanning their kids' Facebook pages with no jurisdiction and no warrants.
Based on other posts, it seems that a lot of what news reports are saying is wrong. The picture was not posted to facebook, it was posted to/b/ on 4chan. If I were the FBI, I'd definitely be monitoring/b/. Random kid's Facebook pages, not so much. It also appears other/b/ readers decided to report it, which is probably how the FBI found out about it anyway. I'd like to see the automated keyword scanning software that picks up that post as malicious. I just don't believe it happened that way, starting from the fact that it'd need handwriting recognition somewhat more advanced than any I've seen, along with the fact that the context that a gun is an important part of the meaning of it.
I learned to program when I was 10 years old by typing in COMPUTE! magazine's BASIC programs into my TI-99/4A. I couldn't even save them until we could afford a cassette recorder,
?!
When I bought mine, a TI-99/4A was about £300, and a cassette recorder about £15. It seems strange to be able to afford the former but not the latter!
I actively avoided TI programs that consisted of nothing but DATA statements of numbers.
Must admit I don't remember seeing any of those. Saw plenty of them for other machines, but as the TI didn't provide a way of executing user-inputted machine code (unless you'd shelled out for the assembler, which only worked if you had a disk drive) I'm not sure what you'd achieve that way there...
s/exists/ever existed/. Unknowable given our current state of science, but some theories would place it quite high.
x (probability a comet hits Mars and expels some rocks with bacteria inside)
Given that life existed, this is almost certain to have happened, probably many times. We know that rocks have been expelled via such a mechanism. We know that in a biosphere like Earth's, it is almost impossible to find surface-level rocks that don't have any signs of life. We would assume that a Martian biosphere, if it existed, would most likely be similar to our own in most ways.
x (probability that the rocks reach the Earth)
We know that this happens.
x (probability that the rock survives without burning through the atmosphere)
We know that this happens, too.
x (probability that the rock is not eroded by wind and water before being collected)
Very high. It takes a *long* time for this to happen.
x (probability that the rock is found by a NASA scientist)
Fairly low. But we do know that it happens.
= ?!?
Answer depends on an unknown variable, but some estimates would place it reasonably high. Possible range of answers is almost zero to somewhere above 0.5, depending on what theories you accept about origins of life.
I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD.
Of course, these are all platforms where either (1) media size is critical or (2) writability is critical. Also small game sizes helps. The fact is that memory cards are much more expensive per GB than Blu-ray discs, and therefore unless there's a *major* advantage to offset this cost BD is quite clearly the way forward for any new game system. And except for handheld devices and downloadable content, I don't see it.
You can get USB cables that have a third connector to supply additional power. Hook one of those up to a power adaptor with a USB output (get 'em on ebay, they're quite cheap these days) and no hub is required.
I wrote: Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
To emphasise this: what exactly does the author in the article that couldn't be applied to a story that clearly was not influenced by hypertext storytelling because it hadn't been invented, e.g. Joseph Heller's Catch 22: a highly nonlinear story which switches attention between numerous different points in its protagonist's career as the reader needs to learn more about the character's history in order to understand what comes next (or before). What the author describes as "levelling up" is generally called "raising the stakes" by most writers and is a widely used trick to keep readers/viewers interested in a long story. See, for example, Lord of the Rings, where it occurs several times: when Frodo et al reach Rivendell, in Moria, when the Fellowship splits. Allusion is a very widely used technique, and has a very long history in filmmaking. A good example of a pre-hypertext film with a lot of allusion is Blade Runner.
What is perhaps interesting is that Lost has a lot more popular appeal than the examples I quote above, so maybe this type of storytelling is becoming more appealing to the average TV viewer?
I'm not sure there is a consolidated list. There is a test procedure that can be used to certify any appropriate device as safe to use (defined in a document identified as "DO-233"), but there doesn't appear to be any centrally organised testing effort, so I'd guess individual airlines probably have their own lists.
I'm ready to go "all-in" with a bet that says the second Google releases the source to VP8, every company with patents on video compression will begin examining VP8 source code for patents. They have their legal teams and engineers ramped up to start digging ASAP and I do believe that's what Steve Jobs means.
Don't forget that Apple is a company with patents on video compression.
Slashdot Mirror
BT is concerned about customers privacy?
No. BT is concerned that invading their customers privacy with no potential profit from doing so is likely to be expensive. They're also concerned that limiting their customers' access to the service they've paid for will cause their customers to move to other ISPs, thus costing them still more money.
But who cares what's motivating them to do this? They're on our side, for once.
This is just code to have the Act applied to small ISP's as well as large, and nothing to do with repealing the act altogether like it sounds.
Not really, no. At least one of the grounds for the complaint, that the law is incompatible with the EU's regulations that require ISPs to be considered as mere carriers of data and not responsible for their users' actions, would result in at least parts of the law being struck off the books entirely if the courts held in their favour.
You call yourself a B5 geek and didn't think of Vorlon ships? Shame.
Heaven forbid a government finding new and innovative ways to deliver services to its people. Maybe the iPhone is not the best platform, but at least they are trying.
They're failing. Over three times as many people in the UK have smartphones that run Symbian than iPhones. Probably somewhere in the region of 50% more have Blackberries. Yet neither of these platforms were targetted, despite the obvious fact that an application for either of these would be much more useful. Why? I'd guess it's because it's not as headline catching. We don't want our government to be catching headlines, we want them to do things that are actually useful.
waste our money on tailored apps for one specific proprietary (and expensive) platform
Proprietary, expensive, and not even with the (poor) justification of it being the most common. iPhone's market penetration in the UK is very low compared to other phone OSs. Both Symbian and Blackberry have much higher sales, and as both of those have been around for longer they probably have an even larger user base. (How long do you use a phone for? 2 years ago, iPhone's sales in the UK were less than 1% of all smartphones.)
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but there are PLENTY of other devices that have buttons that do different things in different situations.
Yes. It's very common. And I regularly see people getting pissed off by it because they wanted to do one thing but ended up with the other (e.g. my DVD player has a button that pressed once pauses, but pressed again stops playback... my housemate regularly presses it twice by mistake and then has to seek back to where he was). It's almost always a mistake, unless there's a good reason you can't have any more buttons (e.g. the device would then need to be too large for some external constraint).
Article currently reads:
"Error. You are unable to view this section .."
cd
MiTM attack. e.g. using an internet cafe, which installs a transparent SSL proxy and can monitor all your transactions. Its OK if you have your own browser device, and previously installed your SSL certificate over a secure channel. But if you get the 'stop sign' over an insecure channel, take it seriously. They don't need to clone your server to compromise you, just a man-in-the-middle.
All you need to do to make this reasonably safe is memorize a few hex digit pairs of your signature fingerprint to check against it when you authorize the exception.
I wonder... did the discussed tests perform a reverse-DNS lookup on the web site's IP address before trying to connect to the https port? Was the result of that reverse DNS lookup used to compare against the SSL cert's CN, or did the test blindly assume that the CN must match the original site's FQDN?
Even if it did, the result may not be valid. Let's pick on the domains on my hosted virtual server, for example. I have one IP address to myself, and host about 20 domains on it. Let's say the domain they choose to examine is dsf.org.uk; they resolve dsf.org.uk to an IP address, which happens to be 80.68.89.98. Connect to that via HTTPS and you'll be given a certificate that's only valid for meridiandigital.net. But do a reverse DNS lookup on it, and you'll get an entirely different address back (meridian.meridiandigital.co.uk).
The only check they could be performing that would make sense would be to test whether the domain in the certificate resolves to the correct IP, but even that's not going to get them very far: my certificate is valid for any subdomain of meridiandigital.net, but I could easily have given different subdomains different IP addresses...
Oh, and totally sucks for developers to work with non-square pixels.
Square or not, what's interesting is that it appears to be using a vertical rather than horizontal orientation for the subpixel units... that's going to really screw up anyone doing subpixel rendering...
Your 300dpi color inkjet (or laserjet) doesn't print halftoned images, and that's what GP was talking about.
It's a very long time since I saw a 300dpi colour inkjet marketed. My current one is 5760x1440, and was a cheapish almost-entry-level model. It also is capable of producing variable sized droplets, and has two different intensities of each coloured ink, so is definitely not an "on or off CMYK pixel" printer. I don't think anybody sells those any more.
While I don't think Apple products are magical, people who don't understand why they sell (or why Nintendo products sell) are fixated by feature lists but kinda miss out on the whole dimension of actual usability of those features.
Bizarrely, I've often found Apple products to be less usable than competitors. The last one I bought was an iPod Shuffle, which suffered from a number of catastrophic usability failures (e.g. buttons that can do multiple different things in different situations, which I often find confusing despite my degree in computer science and specialisation in UI design, so I imagine it must be really tricky for some people; lack of integration with Windows drag and drop so I can't just drop music files on its icon in My Computer as I can with my current device; bizarre behaviour that involves deleting the device's current contents if I plug it in to somebody else's machine to transfer files from there) not to mention other design flaws (IIRC the device could not be used and charged at the same time, which I am perfectly able to do with my current (much cheaper) MP3 player; it also needed a nonstandard and rather flimsy adaptor to connect it to a PC whereas my current device connects via a standard USB cable; I won't even mention the battery issues as this has been done to death).
What Apple *actually* makes are products that *look nice*, usually by looking simple. Looking simple is not the same thing as being usable.
Another question: have they closed the obvious loophole?
(Create two companies, A LLC and B LLC. A LLC performs any random trade you want, and hires B LLC to design an IT system for it. Arrange the accounts such that B's fees are at least as high as A's profit. Extract profit as dividend from B, tax free.)
This book, Permutation City blew my mind when I first read it in the mid 90's. The end game is a cellular automaton that is complex enough to simulate life on a physical level...
Interesting. I've not read any other books by the author, but I've just finished Schild's Ladder, which is about life in an area of the universe with alternative physical laws, which are described as very similar to rules for cellular automata. The life forms are basically patterns in a network of connected nodes which cause a similar pattern to arise nearby when the rules for iterating the network are followed. Couldn't help thinking about Game of Life while reading it...
I must be missing it, but TFA doesn't say anything about the kid (19-yo-man? that's still a kid by many standards) being armed?
In the picture that sparked the arrest, he was waving what appeared to be a loaded revolver. Turns out it was a replica, though.
This was back when you could use a catchall address for a domain without being overwhelmed by spam
You still can. I have several catchall domains. I have a bayesian filter which at last check was dumping about 2,000 spams per day with only around 1 false positive per month. I use sender whitelisting to allow messages from addresses I've sent to in the past. I blacklist specific recipients when the volume of junk getting through the bayesian filter becomes too high (I drop any message addressed to any blacklisted recipient, even if it's also addressed to non-blacklisted ones). I use SPF on any domain it's set up for. I block messages claiming to be from my domains but entering remotely. This brings the volume down to around 15 per day that I have to deal with manually.
Um, I dunno, maybe because they were still investigating and didn't want to jump to any conclusions?
Dunno. If I were investigating it and saw a picture of a kid waving a loaded revolver (a weapon illegal to possess in this country under almost any circumstances) and holding a sign saying he was going to "fuck up the bullies and leave this world", I'd probably jump to conclusions.
A foreign law enforcement agency is scanning their kids' Facebook pages with no jurisdiction and no warrants.
Based on other posts, it seems that a lot of what news reports are saying is wrong. The picture was not posted to facebook, it was posted to /b/ on 4chan. If I were the FBI, I'd definitely be monitoring /b/. Random kid's Facebook pages, not so much. It also appears other /b/ readers decided to report it, which is probably how the FBI found out about it anyway. I'd like to see the automated keyword scanning software that picks up that post as malicious. I just don't believe it happened that way, starting from the fact that it'd need handwriting recognition somewhat more advanced than any I've seen, along with the fact that the context that a gun is an important part of the meaning of it.
I learned to program when I was 10 years old by typing in COMPUTE! magazine's BASIC programs into my TI-99/4A. I couldn't even save them until we could afford a cassette recorder,
?!
When I bought mine, a TI-99/4A was about £300, and a cassette recorder about £15. It seems strange to be able to afford the former but not the latter!
I actively avoided TI programs that consisted of nothing but DATA statements of numbers.
Must admit I don't remember seeing any of those. Saw plenty of them for other machines, but as the TI didn't provide a way of executing user-inputted machine code (unless you'd shelled out for the assembler, which only worked if you had a disk drive) I'm not sure what you'd achieve that way there...
(probability that life exists on Mars)
s/exists/ever existed/.
Unknowable given our current state of science, but some theories would place it quite high.
x (probability a comet hits Mars and expels some rocks with bacteria inside)
Given that life existed, this is almost certain to have happened, probably many times. We know that rocks have been expelled via such a mechanism. We know that in a biosphere like Earth's, it is almost impossible to find surface-level rocks that don't have any signs of life. We would assume that a Martian biosphere, if it existed, would most likely be similar to our own in most ways.
x (probability that the rocks reach the Earth)
We know that this happens.
x (probability that the rock survives without burning through the atmosphere)
We know that this happens, too.
x (probability that the rock is not eroded by wind and water before being collected)
Very high. It takes a *long* time for this to happen.
x (probability that the rock is found by a NASA scientist)
Fairly low. But we do know that it happens.
= ?!?
Answer depends on an unknown variable, but some estimates would place it reasonably high. Possible range of answers is almost zero to somewhere above 0.5, depending on what theories you accept about origins of life.
I don't see how cartridges ever went out of style. Nintendo DS games come on cartridges. PSN on PSP downloads games to a Memory Stick PRO Duo. Wii downloads games to SD.
Of course, these are all platforms where either (1) media size is critical or (2) writability is critical. Also small game sizes helps. The fact is that memory cards are much more expensive per GB than Blu-ray discs, and therefore unless there's a *major* advantage to offset this cost BD is quite clearly the way forward for any new game system. And except for handheld devices and downloadable content, I don't see it.
note: you might need powered USB hub
You can get USB cables that have a third connector to supply additional power. Hook one of those up to a power adaptor with a USB output (get 'em on ebay, they're quite cheap these days) and no hub is required.
I wrote: Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
To emphasise this: what exactly does the author in the article that couldn't be applied to a story that clearly was not influenced by hypertext storytelling because it hadn't been invented, e.g. Joseph Heller's Catch 22: a highly nonlinear story which switches attention between numerous different points in its protagonist's career as the reader needs to learn more about the character's history in order to understand what comes next (or before). What the author describes as "levelling up" is generally called "raising the stakes" by most writers and is a widely used trick to keep readers/viewers interested in a long story. See, for example, Lord of the Rings, where it occurs several times: when Frodo et al reach Rivendell, in Moria, when the Fellowship splits. Allusion is a very widely used technique, and has a very long history in filmmaking. A good example of a pre-hypertext film with a lot of allusion is Blade Runner.
What is perhaps interesting is that Lost has a lot more popular appeal than the examples I quote above, so maybe this type of storytelling is becoming more appealing to the average TV viewer?
Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
Any chance you have a link to that list?
I'm not sure there is a consolidated list. There is a test procedure that can be used to certify any appropriate device as safe to use (defined in a document identified as "DO-233"), but there doesn't appear to be any centrally organised testing effort, so I'd guess individual airlines probably have their own lists.
I'm ready to go "all-in" with a bet that says the second Google releases the source to VP8, every company with patents on video compression will begin examining VP8 source code for patents. They have their legal teams and engineers ramped up to start digging ASAP and I do believe that's what Steve Jobs means.
Don't forget that Apple is a company with patents on video compression.